Wallsten: Rove Going After Hillary… to Help Her?
If you listened to the latest podcast, you know I’m in a Rovian mood right now. So I was intrigued by the following piece by Peter Wallsten in the LA Times. It makes the case that Rove’s latest attacks on Hillary might actually be intended to strengthen her with the Democratic base, in the same way that Rove advocated attacking John Kerry early in the 2004 campaign as a way of conferring front-runner status on him, as opposed to the guy they were really worried about: John Edwards. Anyway: Clinton may be a target of Rove’s reverse psychology.
In this case, Rove’s weeklong broadside against Clinton — which he is expected to repeat in multiple appearances on television talk shows today — looks suspiciously like an exercise in reverse psychology that his team employed three years ago when it was preparing for President Bush’s reelection bid.
The ploy was described by Rove lieutenant Matthew Dowd during a postmortem conference on the 2004 election at Harvard University the month after Bush defeated Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts.
In the run-up to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, when it was not yet clear who Bush’s opponent would be that November, Rove and his aides had begun to fear that their most dangerous foe would be then-Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.
With his Southern base, charismatic style and populist message, Edwards, they believed, could be a real threat to Bush’s reelection.
But instead of attacking Edwards, Rove’s team opened fire at Kerry.
Their thinking went like this, Dowd explained: Democrats, in a knee-jerk reaction to GOP attacks, would rally around Kerry, whom Rove considered a comparatively weak opponent, and make him the party’s nominee. Thus Bush would be spared from confronting Edwards, the candidate Republican strategists actually feared most.
Unlike Kerry, who had been in public service for decades, Edwards was a political newcomer and lacked a long record that could be attacked. And, unlike former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who had been the front-runner but whose campaign was collapsing in Iowa, Edwards couldn’t easily be painted as “nutty.”
If that sounds implausibly convoluted, consider Dowd’s own words:
“Whomever we attacked was going to be emboldened in Democratic primary voters’ minds.
“So we started attacking John Kerry a lot in the end of January because we were very worried about John Edwards,” Dowd said. “And we knew that if we focused on John Kerry, Democratic primary voters would sort of coalesce” around Kerry.
“It wasn’t like we could tag [eliminate] somebody. Whomever we attacked was going to be helped,” he said.
